One Tiny German Town, Seven Big Michelin Stars

Published: April 4, 2013

(Page 4 of 5)

The system is not without its drawbacks. It has been criticized for steering the children of the wealthy into universities and working-class kids into lower-paying jobs; there have been complaints that managers rarely choose minority applicants for the most coveted spots. Compensation in the form of stipends can be quite low, too: azubis in the elite cooking program receive between $750 and $900 a month from their employers, and still have to pay for their room and board. It’s not easy to live on that, but it compares favorably with American college graduates leaving school tens of thousands of dollars in debt and lacking marketable skills. “Instead of learning purely theory or just performing handwork,” Lumpp says of the German practice of alternating on-the-job training and classroom instruction, “you get both pillars, handwork and theory.”

Sow's Stomach, Anyone?

A sampling of Germany's less-than-glorious culinary past.

The Kerschensteiner School was founded in 1951, but since 1992 it has also had a special program to train students who have received university-ready high-school degrees for culinary and hospitality work. One driving force behind the program, still unique in Germany, was Hermann Bareiss, who runs the hotel of the same name and whose personal philosophy is that top hotels and restaurants need top employees. The Kerschensteiner School has three distinct tracks, which prepare students for a range of occupational possibilities, from working in a roadside tavern to an international hotel chain. As the director explained it to me, one group learns that there is red wine and white wine. The next group explores differences between rieslings. The students from the elite program study wines from Napa Valley. They learn two foreign languages and otherwise prepare for the very different work required by the luxury environment.

The dropout rate is low, just 3 to 4 percent. Last year’s national junior cooking champion, Alexander Neuberth, was a recent graduate. Wilsch, the teacher, says he has high hopes for a young woman in another class who is apprenticed to Douce Steiner, the only female chef in Germany with two Michelin stars and also a former student of Wohlfahrt’s.

The school’s curriculum tries to cover all aspects of the restaurant-and-hotel business — for instance, training chefs and servers together so they understand the demands of the kitchen and of the diners. From handling the clients to kitchen hygiene, aspiring chefs learn more than how to make a soufflé. For example, while Wilsch’s students were washing up after their stews, the apprentices in a classroom downstairs were learning about what their instructor called the “nice little creatures,” salmonella, staph and botulism, from a certified chef and restaurateur with a degree in nutrition science.

When it was time to compare the outcomes in the cooking classroom, we waited several minutes, an eternity in restaurant time, for the last group to be ready. “We have four different results,” Wilsch declared, surveying four plates of pörkölt. It was an understatement. The gravies ranged from red to brown; the garnishes varied from whole leaves of parsley to unidentifiable tiny green slivers. Some pasta resembled linguine, some looked like double-wide fettuccine. “What’s wrong with yours?” Wilsch asked a pair of student cooks.

“We don’t have any sauce left,” one said. “We weren’t sure what to do.”

Another group had experimented with pink-tinted pasta — which clashed with the paprika-red goulash. “The noodles themselves are pretty,” Wilsch said encouragingly.

His classroom is a safe place, he says, in which to try and fail. “What’s nice here is that in contrast to the businesses, there’s no boss yelling, no guest waiting,” Wilsch would tell me later.

The first thing you see upon entering the Hotel Bareiss is a vase filled with red roses next to a bronze bust of the founder, the late Hermine Bareiss. An oil painting of her watches over the breakfast buffet. A room is named after her husband, Jakob, who died during World War II. The widowed Hermine founded the hotel in 1951, just as tourism in the Black Forest began to swell. Special trains from the industrial Ruhr Valley would disgorge oxygen-starved workers seeking a few days away from the pollution of the coal mines and steel mills. In 1966, as the hotel was still growing, Hermine sent her son Hermann, who studied cooking and worked in restaurants and hotels from London to Paris to Cairo, an ultimatum: “Move home,” she told him, “or I’m selling.”

Hermann did, and he eventually presided over the expansion of the hotel, which today has 230 beds and 260 full-time employees, along with a spa and sports facilities. When I visited him there on a recent Sunday afternoon, he recalled interviewing a young, awe-struck Claus-Peter Lumpp, who had never been inside a swank hotel. Lumpp caught Bareiss’s attention with stories about cooking with his grandmother. “He was exceptional already as a trainee,” Bareiss said. “He took joy in his work.”